Review: MR MERCEDES by Stephen King

Best known for his novels of horror and the supernatural, Stephen King has over the years written a number of crime and mystery novels, including Misery (1987) – in which author Paul Sheldon abandons his Victorian romances to pen a crime novel – Dolores Claiborne (1992) and The Colorado Kid (2005).
  The title of his latest offering brings to mind King’s fascination with haunted cars but that’s as close to the supernatural tropes as Mr Mercedes (Hodder & Stoughton) gets. Pitched as a suspense thriller, it opens with an eye-witness account of a mass murder, when a stolen Mercedes is driven at high speed into a crowd of people standing outside an auditorium. Eight people are killed, fifteen are wounded, and the perpetrator gets away.
  Months later, recently retired police detective Bill Hodges receives a taunting letter signed by ‘The Mercedes Killer’. Hodges knows he should turn the letter over to his former partner, Pete Huntley, but Hodges is divorced, lonely and purposeless. He has, on occasion, put a .38 revolver in his mouth, “just to see what it feels like to have a loaded gun lying on your tongue and pointing at your palate. Getting used to it, he supposes.”
  Newly energised, Hodges decides to pursue the investigation alone, at least until he can be sure the letter isn’t a hoax. At this point Stephen King opens up the second of the parallel narratives that sustain the story, introducing Brady Hartsfield, a computer repairman and ice-cream van driver and the self-styled ‘Mercedes Killer’. A sociopath, Brady Hartsfield harbours a dark ambition to make his mark on American history by emulating, and perhaps exceeding, some of the worst mass murders of recent times.
  On the face of it, this is a conventional set-up: the cop with nothing left to lose pursuing a deranged serial killer as the clock ticks down to an explosive climax. Mr Mercedes is a more knowing, self-aware thriller than the broad strokes might suggest, however, as the host of quirky references to the genre’s greats – Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Joseph Wambaugh and Edgar Allan Poe – suggests.
  Meanwhile, the strongest influence on Mr Mercedes goes unmentioned. In the past Stephen King has cited John D. MacDonald as one of the three writers who most influenced him as an aspiring novelist – the others were Don Robertson and Richard Matheson – and Bill Hodges is a similar character to MacDonald’s series protagonist Travis McGee, who was neither a policeman nor a private detective.
  “Philip Marlowe you ain’t,” Hodges tells himself, referencing Chandler’s iconic gumshoe. He’s right. Bill Hodges is neither cop nor private eye, but something intriguingly in between, a man with a detective’s skills but no legal basis on which to act in order to prevent mass murder.
  Brady Hartsfield, for his part, is a fascinating variation on the genre’s stereotypical serial killer, the man – and it’s almost always a man – who is as ridiculously well resourced as he is intelligent. By contrast, Hartsfield is all the more plausible and dangerous for the unpredictability of his animal cunning, as he is constantly forced to recalibrate his scheme due to a lack of foresight and financial wherewithal.
  Told in a folksy, conversational style, Mr Mercedes is on one level a thoroughly enjoyable homage to the crime / thriller genre from an author who is obviously steeped in its lore. On another level, the novel stares dead-eyed into the heart of darkness, and explores the social and psychological factors that created the monster Brady Hartsfield. Supernatural tropes may be at a premium, but there is plenty of horror and evil to be found here. The evil is of the chillingly banal variety, the all too familiar desire to triumph over impotent anonymity through infamy and notoriety. The horror emerges via Hartsfield’s entirely logical thought processes, and his ability to blend, chameleon-like, into the society and culture he professes to despise.
  There is good too, of course, as represented by Bill Hodges and the motley band of volunteer helpers – amateurs all – he assembles around him as they bid to prevent a tragedy. In the grand scheme, however, or at least as far as Brady Hartsfield is concerned, good and evil are equally irrelevant: “He muses on the terrorists who brought down the World Trade Centre (he muses on them often). Those clowns actually though they were going to paradise …”
  Brady is operating under no such illusions: “Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion … The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.”
  It’s a downbeat and occasionally unsettling tale. As with all great thrillers, however, it’s also compulsively readable and hugely entertaining. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Irish Times’ Crime Beat

Frank Parrish is a NYPD detective in RJ Ellory’s SAINTS OF NEW YORK (Orion, £12.99, pb), a man who becomes obsessed with the murder of teenage girls. Parrish is initially a conventional character, a hard-drinking loner who subverts the justice system, but it’s hard not to share his obsession, particularly as the young women are being killed for the purpose of snuff movies. Parrish is also haunted by his father’s reputation as one of the eponymous saints, a legendary cop who played a major part in breaking the Mafia’s stranglehold on organised crime in New York, although Frank is convinced that his father was a Mafia pawn. A pleasingly methodical and realistic police procedural, ‘Saints of New York’ is equally impressive as a psychological study of a man on the edge of the abyss, and Ellory invests his gripping plot and strong characterisations with an existential angst that at times makes for harrowing reading.
  Last seen in GONE, BABY, GONE (2008), Dennis Lehane’s private eyes Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro return in MOONLIGHT MILE (Little, Brown, £15.99, pb). The pair have given up their dangerous lives, and have settled into domestic bliss, but Patrick finds himself dragged back into the squalid world he once knew when Amanda McCready, the four-year-old girl he returned to her unfit mother in GONE, BABY, GONE, goes missing again. Likeable but lethal Slavic mobsters provide the narrative tension, and Lehane maintains a page-turning pace courtesy of Patrick’s laconic narration, a downbeat and blackly humorous style that is entirely appropriate for Lehane’s depiction of the banality of evil. Oddly, however, there is a sense that danger is always kept at arm’s length. Recently a father, as is Lehane himself, Patrick prioritises his family over his self-imposed duty to the missing girl. While this may well be an eminently pragmatic way of dealing with drug-fuelled killers, and further subverts the fictional private eye’s time-honoured but implausibly noble instincts to solve a case at all cost, it does have the effect of blunting the novel’s impact.
  Teresa Solano’s A SHORTCUT TO PARADISE (Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99, pb) is a Barcelona-set comic crime offering which heralds the return of the non-identical detective twins Borja and Eduard. The pair are commissioned to investigate the murder of Marina Dolc, bestselling populist writer, on the night she received a prestigious literary award. Was one of Dolc’s rivals the killer? The reader knows from the outset that the hapless novelist (and runner-up) Amadeu Cabestany wasn’t responsible for Dolc’s death, but Cabestany affords Solana ample opportunity to loose comic barbs at the literary snobbishness that denigrates genre fiction in general and crime fiction in particular. The joke wears thin after a while, but Solano also has important things to say, albeit in a deceptively light and humorous fashion, about the global economic downturn, and how formerly upstanding citizens can be driven to criminal actions by forces beyond their control. Given that one of crime fiction’s most important functions is social commentary, Solana’s novel offers a valuable insight into contemporary Spanish life.
  Susanna Gregory’s A BODY IN THE THAMES (Sphere, £19.99, hb) offers an equally fascinating glimpse of a particular time and place, in this case Restoration London. The sixth outing for professional intelligencer - aka spy - Thomas Chaloner, it takes for its backdrop the peace negotiations between the English and the Dutch during the long, hot summer of 1664, as both countries, in theory at least, strive to avoid war. Chaloner investigates the death of his former brother-in-law, Dutch diplomat Willen Hanse, who may well have been murdered by war-mongering hawks from either delegation. Wonderfully researched, the novel is pungent with historical detail, nuggets of which provide any reader who is even vaguely familiar with modern London with plenty of material to delight in. Unfortunately, Gregory’s prose, and particularly her dialogue, is rather stilted, while most of the characters - although based on historical personages - are little more than stiffly drawn ciphers for greed, power and lust.
  Sam Hawken’s debut THE DEAD WOMEN OF JUAREZ (Serpent’s Tail, £10.99, pb) offers another compelling setting, Ciudad Juarez on the US-Mexican border, a city in which locals believe the number of women who have disappeared since 1993, probably murdered, exceeds 5,000. The novel opens with punch-drunk American boxer Kelly Courter attempting to trace his missing girlfriend, Paloma, although the issue is complicated by the fact that Paloma is the sister of Estéban, Kelly’s friend and sometime partner in illicit drug-dealing. These facts are known to Rafael Sevilla, a Juárez police detective, who also takes an interest in Paloma’s disappearance, an interest that is as personal as it is professional. Hawken trades in gritty realism and a haunting sense of loss and hopelessness, and while the novel is very much a singular achievement, it does bring to mind favourable comparisons with Richard Ford’s THE ULTMATE GOOD LUCK (1981).
  The latest in Joseph Wambaugh’s series of ‘Hollywood’ novels, HOLLYWOOD HILLS (Corvus, £16.99, hb) brings together a colourful collection of LAPD cops who work out of the notorious Hollywood Station, splicing their more bizarre tales of working the La-La-Land beat with those of scammers, thieves and reprobates. The multiple storylines and initially bewildering cast of characters may leave some readers disorientated at the beginning, but Wambaugh is a masterful storyteller (this is his 18th novel), and it’s not long before the various elements coalesce into a dazzling mosaic that offers caper-style comedy, downbeat heroics, heartbreakingly authentic detail and unconventional but effective police procedural work. For those unfamiliar with the ‘Hollywood’ novels, Elmore Leonard may prove a useful reference point, with the crucial difference being that Wambaugh’s characters understand that Hollywood is a surreal stage, and that each must play their part to the hilt. - Declan Burke

  This column was first published in the Irish Times.

Here We Go O’Carrolling …

I mentioned Niamh O’Connor during the week in terms of authenticity and her antipathy to the criminals she meets given the nature of her day job as a crime correspondent, and lo! Up pops another debutant author with even stronger claims to authenticity and antipathy. To wit:

Gerry O’Carroll was one of Ireland’s leading serious crime detectives. Born in the west of Ireland, Gerry trained in Dublin and was central to the investigation of over 80 murders. He was the first Irish detective to carry a firearm and has appeared at the top of IRA and gangland murder lists. He personally arrested Ireland’s longest-serving prisoners, the serial killers John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans, and was involved in the pursuit of John Gilligan, responsible for the murder of Veronica Guerin. Gerry was first on the scene when the IRA murdered notorious gangster Martin Cahill.

  Co-written with Jeff Gulvin, O’Carroll’s debut is titled THE GATHERING OF SOULS, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

This gripping debut introduces series characters Detectives Moss Quinn and Joe Doyle in a race against time to find Quinn’s abducted wife. A touch Denis Lehane meets Joseph Wambaugh, this suspenseful, contemporary Irish thriller looks set to join John Connolly and Alex Barclay’s books as an international bestseller. A year to the day after the death of their son, Moss Quinn’s wife Eva Marie has been abducted. He is Dublin’s star detective, investigating the disappearance of five women and the murder of another the year before. Moss’s number-one suspect walks free from the subsequent trial amidst allegations of police brutality meted out by Quinn’s partner, Joe Doyle, an old-school cop. Quinn’s world is in turmoil, his marriage is a mess, his reputation after the trial is in tatters and now his wife has been abducted. Somewhere out there, his wife is lying bound and gagged, she has been left to die of thirst. In 72 hours she will be in a coma or dead, and there is a voice on the phone telling him the clock is ticking and that the clues to his wife’s whereabouts are in his past ... Building to a heart-stopping finale, with a cast of credible and colourful characters from the criminal underworld and police ranks alike, THE GATHERING OF SOULS is an authentic, dark tale of obsession, revenge and redemption.

  O’Carroll, by the way, published a non-fiction title, THE SHERIFF: A DETECTIVE’S STORY, in 2006. Meanwhile, there’s a short interview with Gerry over at The Metro, with one snippet reading thusly:

Q: You were involved in dozens of high profile cases over the years. Which arrest and conviction are you most proud of?

A: “Probably the case of John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans, two English career criminals-turned-murderers. They were convicted for robbery and sent to Mountjoy in the 1970s. But because of a blunder they were convicted under false names and later released. They went on a murderous rampage and killed two women, Mary Duffy and Elizabeth Plunkett. These were the most sickening deaths ever afforded to two human beings. People think killers like these go round with the mark of Cain on their foreheads but they were two ordinary looking guys. After we caught them I was handcuffed to Shaw, and he turned and said to me: ‘Gerry, I’m glad you caught me.’ ‘Why’s that?’ I replied. ‘Because we were going to kill one a week.’ That was one of the most chilling remarks ever made to me. They’re now the longest serving convicts in the history of the state.”

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Stephen J. Cannell

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
SILENT JOE by T. Jefferson Parker, or THE CHOIRBOYS by Joseph Wambaugh.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t read for guilty pleasure. I try to read novelists I can learn from.

Most satisfying writing moment?
The start of each day.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I truthfully haven’t read much Irish crime fiction, but I do read and admire, Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane – both of Irish American descent.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I thought the film adaptation of Lehane’s MYSTIC RIVER was terrific.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
You get to keep your own hours.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Shane Scully is called upon to be a pallbearer and along with his five rail-mates, ends up proving that the death of their great friend inside the box was not a suicide, but a murder.

Who are you reading right now?
THE GATE HOUSE by Nelson DeMille.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. But if I couldn’t proof-read what I wrote, it might not be too good.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Page turning fiction.

Stephen J. Cannell’s ON THE GRIND is available now

Your Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting ...

Herewith be an interview with Arlene Hunt (right; pic stolen from CSNI without so much as a by-your-leave) conducted by yours truly on the occasion of the publication of her latest tome, UNDERTOW. Now read on …

The crime novel is a fiction that is a truth for our times, and it’s certainly true that Arlene Hunt’s novels are nothing if not timely. Her last offering, MISSING PRESUMED DEAD, generated controversy for its subject matter when it appeared shortly after Maddy McCann went missing. That was a coincidence, of course, but it’s a poignant example of the symbiotic relationship between crime fiction and the world it describes.
  “I wrote of a child disappearing in 1980,” Arlene says, “and reappearing almost thirty years later – gun in hand. But because I used a toddler, and she happened to be female and blonde, some people automatically thought, ‘Oh, Maddy McCann’. In fact, I had written the first chapter – which dealt with a toddler disappearing on a beach – many months before that poor child ever visited Portugal. I think people like to look for controversy where none exists.”
  Her latest offering, UNDERTOW, published by Hachette Ireland, also digs into the seamy underbelly of modern Ireland.
  “The book opens with some low-lives smuggling vulnerable women into Ireland,” she says, “one of whom is coldly dispatched when she is deemed too sick to be of any use. We also meet Stacy, a heavily pregnant teenager who hires Sarah and John, my intrepid detectives, to find her boyfriend Orie, little realizing that he is connected with people-smuggling and has very good reasons to have dropped below the radar …”
  UNDERTOW is the fourth novel to feature ‘QuicK Investigations’, a Dublin-based private investigation bureau run by Sarah Kenny and John Quigley, a pleasingly normal pair of detectives who bicker, fall out and flirt – even if all the flirting comes from John’s side. I’m showing my age, but the first thing that springs to mind is the old Bruce Willis / Cybill Shepherd TV show, Moonlighting …
  “You’re not the only one!” Arlene laughs. “It’s not intentional, I promise. I think with John being something of a charming smart-arse and Sarah his relative straight-man, it’s unavoidable that people draw comparisons. Plus, there is the unmistakable whiff of attraction in the air. John has more hair than David (Bruce Willis) though. And Sarah would never wear shoulder pads.”
  Born in Wicklow, and currently living in Dublin, Arlene is nonetheless far more influenced by American writers than their Irish or even European counterparts.
  “I’m an American crime junkie and have been for years and years. Robert Crais, James Lee Burke, Denis Lehane, James Ellroy and my personal favourite, Joseph Wambaugh, are just some of the gentlemen I like to spend an afternoon with. Wambaugh writes the sort of book that stays with you for a long time after. THE GLITTER DOME and THE CHOIRBOYS moved me to tears and yet also had me howling with laughter.”
  So why is it that Irish crime writers tend to look to the States for inspiration?
  “Perhaps because they ‘do’ crime so well, and we can really relate to the great characters they somehow manage to create. I think we ‘get’ American drama better than we get other countries. Some of my earliest memories are watching The Rockford Files and Hawaii Five-O and Kojak with my foster-mother, Kitty. We couldn’t wait for Hill Street Blues to start every week. ‘Book ‘em Danno!’ ‘Who loves ya baby?’ ‘Let’s be careful out there’ … we just never tired of it. These days The Wire and The Shield have tickled my fancy tremendously. I adore Vic Mackey, even though he’s as crooked as a country mile. He is such a terrific character, crooked yet loyal, fierce, soft, vicious, hard, tormented and conflicted.”
  Arlene Hunt is something of a contradiction herself. Young, attractive and impeccably dressed, you’d probably peg her for a chick-lit scribe rather than a ‘crime junkie’ if she told you she’s a writer. So how come she’s poking around in the gory entrails of Irish crime and violence?
  “Ha, I’m blushing now … I’m not really sure what to say about that! I don’t know, people can be anything on the surface, be it attractive, sunny and charming or gruff and shy, but it makes little or no difference to the internal rumblings of that person. It’s funny, but I can be quite cheerfully plotting a murder scene while doing the most mundane things, like shopping in Superquinn, trimming the dog’s wretched nails or when I’m out running. Actually, I think of murder a lot when I run. So if you see me pootling along somewhere with serene smile in place, I’m probably mentally hacking someone to little pieces or super-gluing a character’s nostrils closed ...”
  In American crime writing, the setting of a particular city is very important to the story. How big a ‘character’ is Dublin in Arlene Hunt’s novels?
  “A pretty big one. Dublin is my home. It’s where I’m at my most comfortable, so it was important for John and Sarah – especially for Sarah – to be city-dwellers too. I grew up in Wicklow, I lived in Spain, but Dublin is where I feel happiest. It adopted me as easily as I allowed myself to be adopted. I was born in Clontarf, where Sarah lives for much of the books, and my husband and I frequent Wexford Street a lot where ‘QuicK Investigations’ keep their office. I like that my real and fictional worlds conflate and criss-cross.”
  Finally, there’s a lot of sexual tension between Sarah and John. Will they or won’t they?
  “Hah, you’ll have to wait and see …!”

Arlene Hunt’s UNDERTOW is published by Hachette Ireland.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: Hollywood Station by Joseph Wambaugh

Hollywood Station was billed as a comeback novel for the former LA cop turned scribe, but when you’ve got the likes of The Choirboys, The New Centurions and The Onion Field ruffling around your CV, you’ve earned the right to be away for a while. In Hollywood Station, Wambaugh returns to the LA streets he knows best. Here, an ensemble cast of rookie cops, hardened veterans and those somewhere in-between police the crack-ridden streets of downtown Los Angeles. Throw in the Russian mafia, a diamond robbery and a hapless crystal meth thief out for one big score and you’ve got the basic ingredients for Wambaugh’s latest pot-boiler. If there’s any truth in the old adage in writing about what you know, then Wambaugh has never been off the streets. Vividly plotted and expertly etched, this is an enthralling look at the haphazard, chaotic life of an LA beat officer. As an ex-cop, it’s no surprise that Wambaugh’s empathy lies with those men and women policing the streets. Yet it’s not a blind loyalty as the author doesn’t shy away from presenting the LAPD as a police department in a political correctness crisis, and one which its officers are content to toe the line rather than dictating it on the streets. The writing is forceful, the characterisation is superb, the plot as sharp as a diamond cutter. Mr Wambaugh, it’s good to have you back.- Garreth Murphy